live creatively (or the stuff you do when you ought to be doing something else)

Lifetime of Liberty

This quilt has quite the story to it and as I’m not a writer by trade, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell it on this page how it sounds in my head – my words never come out how they sound in my head, and often, I’m inappropriate, lucky I have some fabulous friends who don’t mind my potty mouth and my lack of tact!

In essence, my mother-in-law Rosemary was an amazingly talented woman in so many facets of her life but her quilting skills were outta this world. In her lifetime, she made more than 100 quilts, and most of these were given as gifts. They were usually pieced by machine and quilted by hand but thankfully we have two of her more labour intensive fully hand pieced gems in our home. She was inspirational and I learnt so much from her (although, I think she’d be horrified by me as machine quilting and binding are more my thing!).

In early 2007, our dear Granny Rose lost her battle with breast cancer. Sadly, she only got to meet the first of her three granddaughters. When I was clearing out her wardrobe, I kept a number of the shirts she had made herself from Liberty and other similarly printed cotton lawn fabrics with the intention of making a quilt for our then only child. That quilt is still in progress as it’s an entirely english paper pieced grandmothers garden. Now that we’ve had two more baby girls, I’m trying to make each of them a granny quilt. Realising though that I’ve no hope of ever finishing three hexy numbers, and remembering one of Rosemary’s beautiful triangle quilts, I’ve paired some of her shirts with some of my Liberty’s and a whole heap of various solids to come up with Violet’s first birthday gift : “Lifetime of Liberty”. It was quite the process, deciding on the final design, I spent hours upon hours moving it around on the design wall and on the floor and seeking the opinions of brutally honest very helpful friends.

Inspired by the conversations I used to have with Rosemary, I have quilted some “words to live by” on the feature triangle: laugh, dream, cry, think, care, believe, dream, love, struggle, inspire, travel, still, create, parent, desire, lifetime.

So, here is the front of Violet’s granny quilt:

and the back:

I absolutely LOVE this quilt. I am so very happy with how it turned out. And I’m very glad I added in those yellow pops which in turn influenced the final colour of that main triangle (Art Gallery Pure Elements).

As a result of my satisfaction, I got cocky and back in November, I submitted an application for the Quilt Show at QuiltCon. Much to my shock and delight, this quilt was accepted. It is now winging its way across the oceans to Austin. I am so very thrilled that my modern quilt, inspired by a very traditional Granny Rose is going to be hung in a show.

Thanks Avis. I can’t remember working with blues and purples like this before, I think it is a first for me! My older girls are very much into pink and orange so this was a nice break from the standards :)